The Wretched Scandal of Reporting from Gaza

In a visit sponsored by the non-governmental organization Save the Children (an NGO not immune to anti-Israel bias according to NGO Monitor), the Daily Telegraph’s Mary Riddell reports on “The wretched scandal of Gaza“. The real scandal, however, is Riddell’s Pavlovian need to attribute blame for Gaza’s situation solely to Israel. She paints an almost apocalyptic vision of Gaza aided and abetted by the Daily Telegraph’s photo editor, who selected the following image to accompany the article: Are Palestinian children really still sleeping outside in the rubble today? We traced the photo and found that it had been originally published on October 16, 2009, nearly two years ago. This isn’t the first time that the Daily Telegraph has been caught recycling old photos of Gaza to create an exaggerated image of suffering. As for Mary Riddell’s article itself, it reads like a piece of anti-Israel propaganda.

Moral Equivalence

Three miles away, across the wasteland, is Sderot, the Israeli town regularly hit by Hamas rockets fired from Gaza. While those attacks have provoked international outrage, few outsiders ever see the return violence visited on innocent inhabitants of a territory under blockade.

Considering the huge amount of coverage of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, the subsequent Goldstone Report and the steady drip-drip of articles highlighting the “suffering of Gaza”, it is testament to Riddell’s obscene and narrow view of reality to claim that the rocket attacks on Sderot had grabbed the world’s attention in comparison to Israeli responses to Hamas terror. In addition, Riddell creates a moral equivalence between Hamas rocket attacks, which are intended to strike innocent civilians, and Israeli countermeasures aimed solely at terrorists in defense of Israeli towns and cities.

No Questions Asked

Surely the job of a professional journalist is to question and investigate. Riddell, however, accepts all that she is told by Gazans (and possibly Save the Children) without any desire to dig deeper for further context.

The fruit farm that was once his livelihood has been flattened by “sweepers” that have destroyed trees and bushes to allow maximum visibility in a buffer zone where, according to a local lawyer, a shoot-to-kill policy still operates. Farmers have been struck down as they tend their land, and a teenager collecting scrap metal from the rubble was shot the day before we drove in.

A similar story of arbitrary and seemingly indiscriminate Israeli shootings of innocent Gazans in the buffer zone was published in February 2011 by The Sunday Times. Failing to ask for the insights of the IDF, the article failed to explain why Palestinian terrorism necessitated a border zone in the first place and failed to mention the daily attempted terror attacks involving not only Qassam missiles but also mortars, rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Having found many holes in the story, HonestReporting concluded that the journalist had deliberately embellished an incident to produce an article full of lazy journalism, conjecture and missing context that leaves the false impression that Israelis open fire on innocent Gazan children for no justifiable reason. And who supplied The Sunday Times with some of the most egregious allegations? It was Save the Children, the very same NGO responsible for Mary Riddell’s visit to Gaza.Could it be that Save the Children is continuing to promote a distorted and biased agenda through the cynical use of the media? This certainly begs the question as to whether Riddell was acting in the capacity as an independent journalist or a shill for Save the Children, an NGO with a history of anti-Israel bias. Is Riddell a trusted journalist who can look at the facts and inform her readers or is she an advocate willing to distort the facts to promote a political agenda? Riddell’s article provides a clear answer.

Mary Riddell

Skewing the Casualty Figures

Almost three years have passed since the start of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Air Force campaign that killed 1,300 Palestinians, many of them women and children, and injured 7,000 more.

Here, Riddell simply rehashes the disproved Palestinian claim of exaggerated civilian deaths with no mention of the number of active combatants and Hamas terrorists that should be included within the casualty figures, which were called into question not only by the IDF but by Hamas itself.

Hamas – No Responsibility

While Riddell understands Israel’s obvious dislike of Hamas, nowhere does she attribute any responsibility to the terrorist organization for the difficult situation in Gaza. Riddell states that Hamas was elected to rule Gaza. Yet, there is no mention of the brutal takeover of the territory when Hamas operatives literally threw Fatah activists off rooftops. There is no mention of the legitimate reasons for the Israeli blockade of Gaza nor Egypt’s former role in enforcing the blockade on its own border with Gaza. No mention of why the entry certain building materials and other goods are restricted (to prevent Hamas building military fortifications or weaponry). No mention either of the huge amounts of commodities and aid pouring through Israel’s border with Gaza that have left the Gazan tunnel smuggling operation unprofitable and Gaza’s supermarket shelves packed with items.

“Starving Gazan Children”

Electricity and the undrinkable tap water are intermittent, and – in a country that should be prosperous – children are routinely starving.

Claiming that Palestinian children are routinely starving is a particularly vicious and inaccurate canard, implying deaths, perhaps on the scale of famine-hit sub-Saharan African nations. In 2009, even the New York Times reported:

It [Gaza] is, of course, crowded and poor, but it is better off than nearly all of Africa as well as parts of Asia. There is no acute malnutrition, and infant mortality rates compare with those in Egypt and Jordan, according to Mahmoud Daher of the World Health Organization here.

It’s Only Israel’s Fault

Riddell concludes:

Countless lives depend on whether Israel can finally be persuaded or shamed into seeing that a prosperous neighbour would be less of a threat than a pariah land in which the Hamas government becomes more entrenched and misery engulfs the peaceful majority.

Gaza could be a prosperous neighbor if Hamas stopped turning the territory into a terror statelet. Gaza could be prosperous if Hamas chose to be a peaceful neighbor and refrained from firing rockets at Israeli towns and cities. Gaza could be prosperous if it were freed from the rule of an extremist and medieval ideology. Is Israel really responsible for all of these conditions?

Buttressed by a recyled photo for added effect, Mary Riddell, the Daily Telegraph and Save the Children have colluded to produce a one-sided piece of anti-Israel agitprop lacking in any context and placing responsibility for the Gazan situation solely and unfairly on Israel.

Send your considered comments to the Daily Telegraph – dtletters@telegraph.co.uk – remembering to include your address and telephone number in order to make your letter eligible for publication.

UPDATE

David Miliband

Only two days after Mary Riddell’s piece was published, Save the Children’s other invited guest, former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has published his account of his visit to Gaza on The Guardian’s Comment is Free site. Contrast Miliband’s article with Riddell’s. While Miliband does deal with some of the political issues and is critical of Israel in part, his piece does not descend into the vitirolic tone and anti-Israel propaganda of Riddell’s that blights so much of the discourse surrounding the Mideast conflict.

How can one trust anything Mary Riddell says, she has eyes resembling the statues of Easter Island and the ignorance emitted on that place led to caniballism. Yes, those who had survived starvation on Easter Island ended up eating each other. This happened as they had removed all of the trees to roll their staring statues down to the coast thereby eroding the soil so nothing could grow. In the case of Mary Riddell, she is eroding the truth which can only lead to a bitter outcome for both herself and the rag she writes for. She should clearly take reference from the recent results and demise of the News of the world and its employees.

It’s not only the media on which we should focus, but also charities. Save the Children has been hostile to Israel for some time, as noted by NGO Monitor.On the SCF’s website you’ll find a Fact Sheet from June 2008, with a file name ‘Alliance_Nakba_fact_sheet_6.08.pdf’. A quote from ‘Haneen’, aged 13, demonstrates the Palestinian agenda of eliminating Israel one way or another: “Palestinian children are without hope now. Sometimes I do not have the feeling that I will go back to my homeland. I am afraid to die before returning back. I wish to go back. I want to feel safe.”

It is sad to withdraw support from charities we have helped all our lives, but it is time to be more realistic and to vote with our wallets and purses.

Come now! How long are we going to waste our precious time anf breath on the hostile media in the West? This is especially true of the UK, which defenitely holds the world’s highest degree in hypocrisy, dishonesty and treachery. Thus, Robert Fisk of the Independent, the vitriolic hatemonger of Israel was given a distigushed award for good reporting, while I can recall many clankers that he dropped and were exposed, and he didn’t even have the decency to renege on his evil statements. There was also a cartoon of Ariel Sharon, based on a drawing by Goya, showing Cronus the Greek Titan swallowing his babies. Only the head was replaced by Sharon’s and the babies were, of course, Palestinian. This vile piece of antisemitic blood libel received an award for the best political cartoon of the year. How about Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, what’s her name? Boothe or something. She is standing in a grocery in Gaza and the shelves are laden with goods, many from Israel, and she blatantly announces, from the grocery that the situation there, in Gaza, is akin to that of Darfur. I must mention another reporter in the same category – Yvonne Ridley. One day she entered, disguised, into Afghanistan and was suddenly captured by the Taliban and charged with no less than being a “Western Spy”. As she personally recalls, she had only one pair of knickers with her (who travels without spare underwear?), and as she recalls she’d launder them in front of her captors, knowing full well what great respect the Muslims have for women, especially the Taliban. Anyway, a few days later she is miraculously released (the spy!). On her return to the UK she converts to Islam because, in her words, the Christian clergy didn’t condemn the Israeli shelling of the Church of Nativity, while it was held hostage by Muslim terrorists. This event of course never occured and she also failed to condemn the disgusting desecration of the holy shrine by the Arab terrorists, including their defecating inside the church. If these are the standard reporters of the UK let them wallow in their own muck and let’s not waste time reacting to the reporting but rather we should concentrate on the exposure of character of these miserable and despicable phonies.

Mary Riddell has written a column for the Telegraph for several years. Normally I am a Telegraph fan but I have concluded she is there to provide an ‘opposite’ view. I am not impressed by her journalistic skills. She seems to lack an enquiring mind, and indulges in hand-wringing without further thought. I was shocked by the sloppy use of an undated old photo.
K B Fletcher

Not only does this sadden me for untruths reported, but even more for what has become of journalism. We cannot believe our photos (photoshopping) and we cannot believe our reporters due to personal agendas (not acknowledged), not enough factual info (due to personal agendas) and outright lying (due to personal agendas)

Mary, Mary quite contrary how does your garden grow, with silver lies and artillary shells and all anti semites (Anti Israel) in a row.

The question is why did the Daily Telegraph publish this article in the first place. Was it passesd by their Jewish in-house legal advisor (a resident of HGS NW London) or was it done on Yom Kippur when he was out of the office. The situation is worse because Milliband was with them and despite his piece on CIF, if appears as if he gave Riddell a seal of approval. If he does not contradict Riddell by an opinion piece in the Telegraph then it would appear he openly supports her.
We should also be concerned about the timing of the visit – was it Yom Kippur?

Got to tell you – I have more or less been banned from the Guardian comments page- for riting pro-Israeli comments-
I have in fact only 10 minutes ago posted a comment which is now being moderated-and nothing is coming up-
However at least my comments on the Daily Telegraph page are being printed in full.

I suppose thats the difference between a left wing (Soviet style system) and the Free press.

Riddell writes of “the 10% of Gazan children so malnourished that their development is permanently stunted.” Oh? “The Occupied Palestinian Territories have a stunting prevalence of 10%—the lowest in the Middle East—according to the study from UNICEF” (http://goo.gl/pVi81). In Yemen, it’s 58%, Egypt 29%, Syria 28%, Iraq 26%, Kuwait 24%, Saudi Arabia 20%, UAE 17%, Oman 13%, Jordan 12%, Lebanon 11%. (I checked the table, and Bahrain is 10% and Qatar—the richest country in the world by GDP per capita—is indeed lower, at 8%). So being under “siege” and “occupation” by Israel may be the best guarantee in the Arab world that your children will grow up to their potential. Full report: http://goo.gl/2DZKX.